Emperor's Throne Room

For other uses, see Throne room.

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The Emperor's Throne Room was a room reserved for Darth Sidious, the Galactic Emperor of the Galactic Empire aboard the DS-2 Death Star II Mobile Battle Station. It was located at the pinnacle of the Emperor's Tower in the north pole of the battle station. The throne room was designed for the sole purpose of intimidating those who entered it. Four years after the Battle of Yavin, as a decisive encounter raged both in space and on the surface of Endor, the Emperor's Throne Room hosted the fateful duel between Darth Vader and his estranged son Luke Skywalker.

Description[]

EmperorsTower-ROTJ — The Emperor's Throne Room was located in an isolation tower on the second Death Star.

Contrary to Galactic Emperor Sheev Palpatine's personal quarters and offices, both on the battle station and back in the Imperial Palace on Coruscant, the second Death Star's throne room was devoid of ornaments and symbols of plush comfort. The bleak, industrial design was meant to frighten all those would enter the chamber, be it prisoners, Imperial subjects, or even dignitaries.^[5] To approach the Emperor, visitors had to cross a narrow bridge that extended over a vast chasm. A mile below, the main reactor of the Death Star glowed an eerie blue color. Several sets of stairs had been placed in the room for no reason other than their own inconvenience.^[3] The throne itself was a simple, contoured swiveling chair set in front of a large circular viewport lined with a web-like framework and equipped with magnification scanners. The dais before the Emperor was flanked by viewscreens linked to the station's computers and communications systems.^[5] There was a holding room, in which visitors seeking admittance in the throne room waited for the authorization.^[3]

The room was not only Palpatine's ceremonial seat of power on the battle station, as it also served as the Emperor's command center,^[5] and Palpatine was able to send orders to his forces from the room.^[6] Located atop the high^[7] Emperor's Tower^[8] on the second Death Star, the throne room gave Palpatine the chance to watch over the destruction^[7] unleashed during the Battle of Endor.^[2] The room also featured some red lighting, as the Emperor favored using decor in that color. This also allowed for Imperial Royal Guards to blend into the room.^[7]

History[]

LukeMeetsTheEmperor-RotJ40-Prouse — Darth Vader escorts his son into the Emperor's Throne Room on the Death Star.

"All orders were coming from the Emperor himself, but the overbridge says there's no response from the throne room."
"That's not possible. There's some mistake."

―Ives and Emarr Ottkreg^[6]

When the Emperor visited the Death Star shortly before his death during the Battle of Endor, the throne room had only just been finished.^[3] The ultimate confrontation between Jedi and the Sith took place in the throne room when Luke Skywalker, last heir of the Jedi ways, faced Palpatine and his apprentice Darth Vader. The Emperor taunted and tempted Skywalker, leading to duel Vader, who was in fact the young Jedi's estranged father. Although Skywalker managed to cripple Vader, he refused to succumb to the dark side. Enraged at the young man's denial, the Emperor unleashed deadly Force lightning into Skywalker. The Jedi's pleas for help awakened the good in Vader, who then chose to renounce his connection to the dark side and turned against the Emperor. While he had suffered fatal injuries from the Emperor's lightning, Vader managed to hurl him into the reactor shaft, which killed the tyrant, releasing a blaze of dark side energy.^[2]

A Dyad in the Force — Rey and Kylo Ren confronted each other in the ruins of the throne room long after the second Death Star's destruction.

After the Death Star's destruction, the wreckage of the throne room crashed into the oceans of the moon Kef Bir. Luke Skywalker's Jedi apprentice, the scavenger Rey, came to the wreck^[4] in 35 ABY^[9] to search for a Sith wayfinder that would lead her to the resurrected Sidious on Exegol. After she encountered a Force vision of herself fallen to the dark side, First Order Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, Sidious' new enforcer, appeared in the ruined throne room and destroyed the relic, and a duel between the two ensued, which ultimately led to Ren renouncing the dark side of the Force.^[4]

Behind the scenes[]

Conception[]

McQuarrie throne — Concept art for the Emperor's Throne Room by Ralph McQuarrie

The Emperor's Throne Room was not aboard the second Death Star at all in its earliest incarnation conceptualized by Ralph McQuarrie, but rather deep below the Imperial Palace on Had Abbadon, overlooking a lake of lava. An early sketch of the exterior of the second Death Star had the throne room as a contained sphere held away from the station by two bracketing arms. In other of McQuarrie's early sketches, the throne was suspended from above by a thick cylindrical arm. Other McQuarrie art showed the throne in a central elevated disk connected by a bewildering array of curving catwalks.^[10]

When he discussed with Ian McDiarmid about his role as Emperor Palpatine during filming of 1983's Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi, George Lucas pointed out that the throne room was oval-shaped as a reference to the Oval Office, and more specifically former President of the United States Richard Nixon's occupancy in it.^[11]

Inconsistencies[]

In Star Wars: Episode IX The Rise of Skywalker, the layout of the throne room is inconsistent^[4] with its Return of the Jedi appearance.^[2] There is a hallway leading into it^[4] instead of the turbolift shaft,^[2] and an entire hidden vault was added at the right hand of the throne. The presence of said vault is also inconsistent^[4] with the external appearance of the tower containing the throne room depicted in Return of the Jedi,^[2] and contradicts the tower cross-section illustration in the 2016 reference book Star Wars: Complete Locations.^[12]